Five Uneasy Pieces Read online

  Five Uneasy Pieces

  by

  Debbi Mack

  All Rights Reserved

  Copyright © 2010 Debbi Mack

  No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information contact Debbi Mack, www.debbimack.com

  Cover design © 2010 by Brian McKenna

  Smashwords Edition 1.0, July 2010

  This collection is comprised of works of fiction. All names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are factitiously used. Any semblance to actual persons, living or dead, real events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Smashwords Edition License Notes

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the author’s work.

  * * * * *

  Five Uneasy Pieces

  Author’s Note

  I named this collection not only as a play on the film title Five Easy Pieces and a reference to the number of stories in it, but also because the stories all have an odd twist or edginess that makes them slightly off-balance or unusual. By and large, they’re dark, but I’ve included one that’s humorous. I also find it difficult to write short stories. I’ve never considered myself to be primarily a short fiction writer. However, now and then, I’ll seize upon an idea that seems to be best handled in that form.

  In any case, I hope you’ll enjoy them.

  Three of the stories were originally published as part of other collections. The rest are published here for the first time.

  “Deadly Detour” was originally published in the Chesapeake Crimes anthology.

  “A Woman Who Thinks” was originally published in the anthology Chesapeake Crimes: They Had It Comin’.

  “The Right to Remain Silent” was originally published in The Back Alley Webzine. It was nominated for a Derringer Award in 2010.

  What They Are Saying About

  Five Uneasy Pieces:

  “In her introductory note to Five Uneasy Pieces, Debbi Mack claims she finds writing short stories ‘difficult.’ Well, you wouldn’t know it from the ‘pieces’ themselves. Each rings true as a tuning fork, whether for dialogue, setting, or depth. A lean collection of gems.” —Jeremiah Healy, author of Off-Season and The Concise Cuddy

  “Five Uneasy Pieces packs a nasty punch that will keep mystery fans enthralled.” —Simon Wood, author of Terminated.

  “In her first collection of short works, Five Uneasy Pieces, 2010 Derringer Award nominee Debbi Mack creates modern-day noir worlds where voyeurism and sleuthing are as natural to its inhabitants as breathing. Never content to leave well enough alone, Mack’s fascinating cavalcade of off-kilter protagonists spy and insinuate themselves into other people’s lives – to mostly tragic effect.

  “While descriptive, observational humor was a hallmark of Mack’s excellent hardboiled crime novel Identity Crisis, here she uses it sparingly, and instead infuses a handful of riveting mini-mysteries with a real sense of dread, fear, and unease that lingers long after the lights are out. Recommended.”

  —J.T. Cummins, author of Cobblestones

  “Mack really packs twists and surprises into these five shorts.” —C.J. West, author of The End of Marking Time

  Contents

  “Deadly Detour”

  “The Right to Remain Silent”

  “A Woman Who Thinks”

  “The People Next Door”

  “Sympathy for the Devil”

  Excerpt from Debbi Mack’s novel Least Wanted

  * * * * *

  DEADLY DETOUR

  Late July is no time to be sitting in a car, in a parking lot, in Ocean City, Maryland. It was stinking hot, and moist air pressed in through the open windows and enveloped me like a blanket. I glanced at my watch and cursed Mendez for her lateness.

  I’m too old for this, I thought. Women pushing forty should be working in offices, not in the field. Sure, work in an office. Answer phones, attend meetings, push paper—sounded like slow death by boredom. Of course, how exciting was waiting for someone outside a seedy hotel, an unringing cell phone in my lap. Intelligence work is so glamorous, providing the chance to visit so many exotic locales, such as this one. Such as the many I had visited during my 15-year stint with the agency.

  “Doomed,” I said, aloud, to no one. I wasn’t sure if I was talking about myself or the Bayside Villas.

  A set of low, rectangular white stucco boxes, the Bayside Villas looked strangely like white frosted cakes in the moonlight, their windows trimmed in “food coloring” blue. The sound of a yapping dog and a TV set blaring somewhere did little to lift the status of the place.

  “What a dump!” I said, imitating Elizabeth Taylor’s imitation of Bette Davis in the movie Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf.

  I stared at the door to Unit 8, as if that would make Mendez appear sooner. So far, it wasn’t working. In the window to Unit 7, the curtain moved for the second time. I smiled.

  “Nervous?” I said. Probably afraid I was casing the joint. As if any sane burglar would waste his time here.

  A jazz piano tune floated from the dashboard radio. I closed my eyes, opened them a second later. Not good to keep your eyes closed too long at this job. The distant neon circles of a double-decker Ferris wheel bobbed with numbing regularity over the flat rooftops. The bay waters swooshed at intervals against a nearby bulkhead.

  Another twenty minutes ticked by. A breeze fragile as a kitten’s breath eased through the car, carrying with it the scent of creosote-treated wood. Sweat tickled my neck. Wearily, I wiped it away. The Ferris wheel went through countless cycles.

  The Unit 7 curtain moved again, was held longer this time, then dropped.

  So what was that all about? Surreptitious interest? Paranoia? Maybe my paranoia. Maybe it had nothing to do with me. Still, it wouldn’t hurt to leave for a while. Nothing was up here. And, unless she was in some sort of huge trouble, Mendez should eventually return the message I’d left on her cell phone, let me know she got in okay.

  As I turned the ignition key, the door to Unit 7 flew open. A young woman shot out and ran toward my car. Her face was pale, her hair long and dark. She wore a baggy dress, several sizes too large, out of which her skinny arms and legs stuck ridiculously. A large plastic purse on her arm slapped her side as she ran.

  I realized that the immense dress was accommodating an immensely-pregnant belly. She moved with amazing speed for one so far along in her maternity. She ran up to my window and leaned in, gasping. She was just a kid, complete with button nose and freckles.

  “Help,” she screamed.

  A tall and thin, but muscular, man in a tank top and olive green pants appeared in the open doorway. The light from the room revealed something tucked in his waistband—a gun.

  “Get in,” I said. As she ran to the passenger’s side, I leaned over to unlock the door. Meanwhile, the man had bolted from the room and was racing toward my car. He had the gun in his hand now.

  “Hurry,” I yelled. She opened the door and flung herself inside. I took off, tires squealing. I made a mental note of the man’s white-blonde hair, dark complexion, and the deep scar on his left cheek, in case I ever had to pick him out of a line-up. A line-up was the kind of place I would have expected to see such a face. He did me the kindnes
s of not shooting holes in my car as we sped off.

  I made an arbitrary right into the great traffic riptide of Ocean Highway in mid-season.

  “Where to?” I said, keeping my eyes on the road and looking out for the occasional idiot tourist that might choose to do a jack rabbit run across my path.

  “Make a U-turn. Now.”

  She spoke with incongruous authority. I glanced at her long enough to see that she had a gun trained on me.

  “Firearms,” I said, affecting an air of unconcern. “Must we?” I was a bit surprised. Not because she was a kid with a gun. In my line of work, I’ve seen kids younger than her running around with guns that would make an NRA member weep with envy. And I’ve been on the wrong end of a gun barrel before. It’s just that she really didn’t look like that kind of kid. There was nothing street-wise about the face, the attitude, or the way her gun hand shook.

  “I said do it!” Her voice spiked into a nervous falsetto on the word “do.”

  “Why don’t you put that away?”

  “Why should I?”

  “Well, at the risk of offending you, you’re not exactly convincing me that you’ll actually shoot.”

  She just stared at me. We were heading into the heart of old-town Ocean City. Traffic had slowed to a crawl, because the Route 50 drawbridge was up. In the distance, I could hear the clatter of the roller coaster and the screams of people on it. The streets were crammed with hordes of college students, young couples, and bikers.

  “You’re really going to shoot me?” I said. “Right here, in the middle of traffic?”

  Reluctantly, she lowered the gun into her lap.

  “Better,” I said. A cross-street was coming up, so I slowly nosed my way to the left on the one-way road. I managed to get all the way over before the intersection, so I made the turn, went one block over, and turned left again to go back the way I’d come.

  She seemed to relax a little, although she didn’t let go of the gun. She had that peculiar combination of worldliness and innocence that you see in a kid that’s grown up too fast.

  “I take it there’s somewhere you’d like to go?” I said.

  She looked at me sideways. “I wasn’t sure if you’d take me there.”

  “You could always ask.”

  “Delaware?”

  Delaware wasn’t far; it wasn’t around the corner, either. Ocean City, Maryland is on a thin finger of real estate sandwiched between the Atlantic Ocean and the Isle of Wight Bay. From the southern-most end of town, where we were, it might take twenty minutes to reach the Delaware line, if traffic was good.

  “Where in Delaware?” I asked. She could have been talking about a beach town; she could be talking about Wilmington, on the other side of the state.

  “Between Fenwick and Bethany Beach? It’s not far.” She was starting to sound hopeful.

  “Well ...” I wondered where Mendez might be. She might have arrived while all this was going on. The last time I’d tried to reach her, there was no answer. The silence was filled briefly with a bizarre duet courtesy of Miles Davis and a city bus.

  The girl reached for her purse and put the gun in it, pulling out a pack of cigarettes and a pink Zippo lighter. She eyed me with curiosity as she lit up, still waiting for an answer.

  “Bad for the baby, isn’t it?” I said.

  “So what are you now, my mother?” Suddenly, she sounded as if she were speaking through clenched vocal chords. She took an aggressive drag on the cigarette, then tapped it extraneously on the sill. “I don’t need a lecture on my health, okay?”

  “What is this, maybe your eighth month? Ninth?”

  She sighed. “Can we skip the maternal chit-chat, mom?”

  “And can we skip the sarcasm? I mean, who’s doing whom a favor here? Understand this—I’m not your mom. I’m only asking because you look like you could drop that load any second. And I don’t make deliveries. So, you start going into labor, I don’t care where you say you want to go—we’re heading for the nearest hospital. Clear?”

  “Okay, whatever.” She plucked at her dress, as if to remove lint, and did another tap or two with her cigarette. I supposed this was her notion of acting cool and collected. She looked about as cool as a dental patient waiting for a root canal.

  “Don’t be a hard ass, okay?” she said. “Anyway, don’t worry about all that. Everything will be just fine.” Her voice trailed off, as if she didn’t quite believe that last point.

  As we cruised past the steadily-climbing, numbered side streets, I wondered just what the hell I was doing. My line of work does not encourage voluntary heroics. There’s no percentage in it. But when I looked at the waif-like girl, something made me want to help her. Maybe in certain respects, she reminded me of myself. If I thought real hard, I might remember what it was like to be that age and to think you know everything.

  The cell phone in my lap chose that moment to ring.

  I snatched it up. “Where are you?” I said.

  “Stuck on a focking runway.” When Mendez was mad, her accent was usually strong. Tonight, it was positively robust, even over the phone’s static. “Someone stole my focking cell phone. I had to borrow this nice gentleman’s.”

  “I see.”

  “We’ve been here for focking hours. I can’t smoke…can’t…take a goddamn leak.” Her voice began to break up.

  “I see.” Mendez looks like Rita Moreno in her heyday, but swears like a sailor. I wondered what the nice gentleman might be thinking as he overheard this particular conversation.

  “Hello? I can’t…goddamn thing. I’ll… reach…can’t…” The phone took a turn for the worse and her words became incomprehensible sound blurbs.

  “Hello? Hello?” I said.

  “Are you there?” With a blast of static, communication returned. “Jesus, I need a focking cigarette—ay!”

  “Call me when you land,” I said.

  “I can’t focking hear you. Our…friend will meet us in the morning. That place…you know.”

  “Call me!” I yelled, but she was talking at the same time, in semi-decipherable Spanish. Suddenly, we were disconnected. I sighed and dropped the phone in my lap.

  The girl eyed me suspiciously. “Who was that?”

  “Just an old college pal,” I said. I didn’t even see her reach for the phone. Next thing I knew, it was in her hand.

  “Hey!” I said.

  Then she launched it out the window.

  “What the hell?” I said. “Lucky for you that’s a company phone, or I’d…”

  “You’d what?”

  I shook my head, as if it would make everything clearer. “What the hell did you do that for?”

  “In case.”

  “In case of what?”

  “Forget it. Just drive.”

  “Hey…hey!” I pointed my finger at her. “I’m inclined to kick your ass out of this car right now.”

  There was a moment of silence. “I’m sorry.” Her voice was subdued.

  “Sorry! That’s great. I’ll probably get docked for the cost of a new phone. Ohh…” At the nearest intersection, I swerved over two lanes, drawing honks from a few critics, and turned onto the side street. I parked the car and pulled a few bucks from my fanny pack.

  “Get out. Here’s some money. Take the bus. Or not. I don’t care. Just take a hike.”

  I handed over the bills. As she took them, I could see her hand shaking.

  “Oh, what is this…” I started to say something, but she had begun crying now and I didn’t think she was acting. Soundlessly, at first, tears streamed down her cheeks. Then, with a great inhale of breath, she began sobbing, her shoulders shaking and her arms clutched around her belly.

  “I freaked out,” she said, in a high, quavering voice. “I’m sorry. I’m really sorry. Please don’t leave me here. I’m sorry. Damn it.” She wiped the tears away fiercely with the back of her hand.

  “What is it with you?” I tried to hide my irritation, with little success.
r />   “I thought maybe you’d call the cops. I thought… I don’t know. I don’t know what I thought. I just freaked, that’s all.”

  “Okay, okay. We’ve established that. Christ.” I leaned against the seat and waited for the storm to pass. But the tears kept coming.

  “Someone was supposed to pick me up…back there,” she said, between sobs. “But he never showed. And all I could think… I just had to get out. That man back there. He would have killed me.”

  I thought of the blond with the scar. “Yeah, he didn’t look all that pleasant.”

  “I didn’t know what to do.” With her fingers, she raked her hair out of her face, now mottled from crying. “I figured I’d head for our usual place. I figured, maybe my friend got held up or something. Maybe he’s there.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Okay, fine.”

  Mendez was held up on a runway, swearing at her smokeless lot in life. She’d said something about meeting our contact tomorrow morning. What was I going to do until then? Go back to an empty motel room and watch HBO until I fell asleep, probably. The girl was making futile attempts to stem the flow of liquid snot from her nose. Hell, I was halfway to the state line already.

  “All right. I’ll take you to Delaware. But no more funny stuff, right? I mean it. No guns, no throwing things.”

  She nodded. “Everything’s all fucked up. I don’t know what’s going on. I hope he’s there.”

  “Right.” I hoped like hell he was there, too.

  Up Ocean Highway we went, past the towering condos at the north end of town, across the state line, and into Fenwick Island, Delaware. After Fenwick, development became sparse, then dwindled to nothing as we drove past the state park. At sixty miles an hour, the wet ocean breeze blasted through the car, taking the edge off the heat. Sand dunes undulated to our right, providing occasional glimpses of a golden full moon against a velvety black sky.